Bones and squidge

and other expressions of existential terror

Neuroses always need a place to settle for a while.

In the current cycle of upholding the illusion that certainty can be attained – and disaster staved off – through preparation, my neuroses are focused on bones.

The Dancer by Egon Schiele (left) and The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

How do I look after them so that they hold me upright, unbroken, for as long as possible?

And how do I balance my concern about my bones with my other neuroses?

Like the devastation animal farming causes, or the glut of my choices while other people are actively starved?

Wobbling on your feet

In my twenties I saw a woman of advanced years – in her eighties, I guessed at the time – trying to cross the road at the pedestrian crossing. The light was green for her, but South African drivers don’t care much about pedestrians and the cars that crossed in front of and behind her caused her such anxiety there was panic in her eyes as she tried to swivel her head on her stiffened neck to check for danger.

I got it into my head that I needed to stay limber and have core strength so that I could be better prepared for the terror of being on the roads when I am older. The world did not seem like a friendly place for humans with a lot of mileage on their clocks.

Youth, if it considers ageing at all, is almost always convinced it can beat decline.

One day when Sam and I walked past an old-age home near where we stayed in Berlin last year, I could see a person in one of those beds where the back ramps you up into a sitting position.

They were looking out of the window towards the pavement. We weren’t close enough for me to see whether they were looking at us, or at the bright-red begonias in pots by the windows, or a tree in the garden.

‘Please, if I become immobile or sick,’ I said to Sam, ‘find a way to get me outside. Find a way for me to move.’

He is six years younger than I am and I bank on this age difference for selfish desires to have my fears of frailty allayed by his imagined vitality when we have reached the age of minimum movement.

The received wisdom: measuring means treasuring

A Roz Chast cartoon in the New Yorker shows picture of a man walking down a street with his hands in his pockets, whistling. The text above him says ‘The guy who didn’t know his cholestrol, his BMI, his net worth, his IQ, his credit score, his astrological sign, or his ancestry.’

I have a friend who knows how many milligrams of what-what one must eat in a day to make sure he doesn’t implode, explode, shatter or wilt. I have another friend who wears a ring that seems to measure every blip and beep in his body.

When I swim, I count pointless things: breaths, strokes, lengths, minutes. It’s information that leaves my head before I have heaved myself out of the gym’s pool. I do it because it’s a reasonably anodyne expression of obsessive behaviour.

I make a list of every fruit, vegetable, nut and seed that makes its way through my alimentary canal so that I can make sure the unmeasurable reading on my gut health stays imaginarily excellent.

We’re urged to measure things if we want to manage them.

I don’t really want to measure my life in bananas and reps because I don’t want to feed useless fixations. Yet I can tell you exactly what I think I weigh right now down to the decimal point (though the scale is broken) and if you give me a sec, I’ll tell you how many kilometres I walked last year.

It’s so frigging boring it’s not even funny.

And now I’m worried about turning into a marshmallow in old age – and falling and breaking bones and being confined to a single room and not being able to feel the air on my face anymore.

So I’m stressing about bones.

Should start taking a collagen supplement because I don’t eat enough meat, even though taking collagen is antithetical to reducing my carbon footprint?

But what is my carbon footprint in comparison to this many tonnes of bombs and this many miles of destruction of nature to feed meat greed?

Arrghhh!!!

I sometimes wish I had a blank brain.

I wish I could sometimes be Mr Happy walking down the road whistling, with my hands in my pockets, blissfully unworried about whether my bones look like dry sea sponge or whether I’ve eaten enough protein this week.

Lots of love,

K.